This is not a finance book. It's a story.
But it's a story built on the lessons of the most-read personal finance books of the last century: The Richest Man in Babylon, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Psychology of Money, The Intelligent Investor, Your Money or Your Life, The Millionaire Next Door and several more. Each of those books holds one or two ideas that, if you truly understand them, change your relationship with money forever. The problem is that they usually come wrapped in hundreds of pages, in distant contexts, with examples from cities that look nothing like ours.
So I did what the old teachers did: I turned the lessons into a story. And like the best stories, this one has a secret: a padlocked drawer, a notebook with ten rules, and a twenty-year-old debt nobody ever talked about.
You are going to meet Valentina, a twenty-seven-year-old designer who earns a good salary and reaches the end of every month with nothing. Her brother Tomás, who wants to get rich fast. Camila, who just bought a car. Sebastián, who always has the investment of the moment. Gloria, who sells lunches. And Don Aurelio, the old man who runs the bicycle shop on the corner, who knows far more than he lets on.
Each chapter tells a piece of Vale's life in short scenes and demonstrates, in practice, a single lesson. At the end of each one you'll find three brief things: what Vale learned, which book the idea comes from, and one concrete thing to do today. No more, no less. You can read the book straight through in an afternoon, or one chapter a week, doing the exercise before moving on. Both ways work.
An honest warning: this book will not tell you what to invest in, and it promises nothing. Nobody serious can do that. What it can do is give you the map most of us were never given, at home or at school, and that the people who have it use in silence.
I had Valentina's face too. A few years ago I owed more than I earned in a year and I had no map. This book is the map I wish I had found back then.
Don Aurelio sums it up better than I can: a part of everything you earn is yours. Keep it first. The rest will come.
Let's begin.